It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it’s still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What’s more, I don’t think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

  • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361

    Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities

    • Merwyn@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it’s “fully ready” to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it’s very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.

    • applejacks@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      It’s also advantageous to keep low agency and low quality users on reddit.

      Lemmy has already started to decline in quality since average redditors started migrating here.

  • JerkyChew@lemmy.one
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I’ve been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it’s a “viable Reddit alternative”. Right now it’s barely usable.

  • Beefalo@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn’t really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.

    Oh, yes lawd, that’s what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.

    I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.

    Now that’s starting to leak into Lemmy and I’m frankly eyeing the door.

    If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn’t like Reddit. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want there to come here, either.

    The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don’t NEED growth. A lot of you can’t understand that. You can’t understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn’t get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that’s what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.

    So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.

    • h3ndrik@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      I agree and disagree.

      If it’s one or the other I’d also say we don’t need growth. But truth is: We have to be of a certain size so that talking about niche topics works. Currently there are communities that just don’t work because it’s just one person or a very few active people and it’s not enough for a conversation. It’s just, we need to grow in a healthy way. In certain places and we need to attract just the right people.

      But altogether it’s what i’ve been saying about free software and/or platforms for years now. We don’t need to compare ourselves to something else, we don’t need to clone something else… This is our little cozy place. If i wanted everything to be like on reddit, I’d just go there and not spend my time here and complain.

      One thing I disagree is that Lemmy is becoming like Reddit. I met a few nice people here. And it did and still does feel different. And maybe this place is big enough to be a home for all of us. From people who are ‘toxic’ in other people’s eyes to people that just want to talk about 80s computers. I think we need a few things to change and a technical solution to the problem so that people can get along. We already have federation and some servers de-federating others because of fundamental disagreements. I think moderation has to be enhanced. And we need to stop showing the ‘ALL’ feed per default. That just contains silly memes or lots of low quality content. That’d be a good start.

  • glasgitarrewelt@feddit.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    Two of my reddit using friends have never heard of lemmy until I told them about it a few days ago. Although they are quite invested in the FOSS world.

    I am here because I read something about Lemmy on reddit, two or three times. More exposure on reddit would show many people that there is an alternative. It wouldn’t convince millions but maybe enough to let some niche communities grow.

  • vegantomato@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit.

    I will tell you why this is not true.

    Any platform that becomes successful enough to grow and cater to a larger audience eventually gets sold to large corpos. This is inevitable, because the owner usually doesn’t have the principles to say “no” to $100m+. This is a bad thing, why? Because you joined the platform due to its reliability and its culture. These things are no longer guaranteed to stay when the owner is replaced. So the previous owner essentially did a bait-and-switch by selling you (the user-base) to a corporation.

    On one hand this leads to a more stable platform that can withstand legal trouble and has a steady inflow of money to maintain service. On the other hand, you get cencorship, woke ESG-score-friendly ideology and UX anti-patterns (like when Reddit constantly pushes their app to track you and show you ads). The ending of such a platform is hatred from most common people and aggressive monetization by the owners to compensate for a lower rate of growth. These owners, usually shareholders of publicly traded companies, do not care about maintaining quality as much as they care about generating wealth. This means that they will resort to several anti-user tactics to keep growing their wealth, like for example milking the platform dry with ads & micro-transactions.

    Lemmy.world and other large instances are just like Condé Nast Reddit. Same censorship, same garbage. If you think that Lemmy is more free, then let me remind you that Reddit pre-2014 was more free than Lemmy.world. Yes, once upon a time Reddit was much more free and open than the so called “Lemmyverse”. Why I say this is because of Lemmy’s rules and policies. As an anecdote, I literally got banned from a community for saying that there are only two sexes (no foul language, nothing). For me, who was a Redditor during the pre-2014 era, this was unheard of. Lemmy is less like Old Reddit, and more like Raddle.me (Communist Old Reddit-clone). Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone. It’s not as fringe as Raddle.me, but it is still fringe, and it will therefore not be able to have the same reach as Old Reddit once had. The fact that Reddit is woke now is a bait-and-switch, as I explained earlier. Reddit would have never been successful had it been woke from Day 1. I predict that Lemmy will never grow as large as Reddit because of this reason.

    To mods: Leave this post be. If not, you can have your echo-chamber, and I’m fucking out of here.